White Fang - Chapter 12

Chapter XII - The Trail of the Gods

In the fall of the year, when the days were shortening and the bite
of the frost was coming into the air, White Fang got his chance for
liberty. For several days there had been a great hubbub in the
village. The summer camp was being dismantled, and the tribe, bag
and baggage, was preparing to go off to the fall hunting. White
Fang watched it all with eager eyes, and when the tepees began to
come down and the canoes were loading at the bank, he understood.
Already the canoes were departing, and some had disappeared down
the river.

Quite deliberately he determined to stay behind. He waited his
opportunity to slink out of camp to the woods. Here, in the
running stream where ice was beginning to form, he hid his trail.
Then he crawled into the heart of a dense thicket and waited. The
time passed by, and he slept intermittently for hours. Then he was
aroused by Grey Beaver's voice calling him by name. There were
other voices. White Fang could hear Grey Beaver's squaw taking
part in the search, and Mit-sah, who was Grey Beaver's son.

White Fang trembled with fear, and though the impulse came to crawl
out of his hiding-place, he resisted it. After a time the voices
died away, and some time after that he crept out to enjoy the
success of his undertaking. Darkness was coming on, and for a
while he played about among the trees, pleasuring in his freedom.
Then, and quite suddenly, he became aware of loneliness. He sat
down to consider, listening to the silence of the forest and
perturbed by it. That nothing moved nor sounded, seemed ominous.
He felt the lurking of danger, unseen and unguessed. He was
suspicious of the looming bulks of the trees and of the dark
shadows that might conceal all manner of perilous things.

Then it was cold. Here was no warm side of a tepee against which
to snuggle. The frost was in his feet, and he kept lifting first
one fore-foot and then the other. He curved his bushy tail around
to cover them, and at the same time he saw a vision. There was
nothing strange about it. Upon his inward sight was impressed a
succession of memory-pictures. He saw the camp again, the tepees,
and the blaze of the fires. He heard the shrill voices of the
women, the gruff basses of the men, and the snarling of the dogs.
He was hungry, and he remembered pieces of meat and fish that had
been thrown him. Here was no meat, nothing but a threatening and
inedible silence.

His bondage had softened him. Irresponsibility had weakened him.
He had forgotten how to shift for himself. The night yawned about
him. His senses, accustomed to the hum and bustle of the camp,
used to the continuous impact of sights and sounds, were now left
idle. There was nothing to do, nothing to see nor hear. They
strained to catch some interruption of the silence and immobility
of nature. They were appalled by inaction and by the feel of
something terrible impending.

He gave a great start of fright. A colossal and formless something
was rushing across the field of his vision. It was a tree-shadow
flung by the moon, from whose face the clouds had been brushed
away. Reassured, he whimpered softly; then he suppressed the
whimper for fear that it might attract the attention of the lurking
dangers.

A tree, contracting in the cool of the night, made a loud noise.
It was directly above him. He yelped in his fright. A panic
seized him, and he ran madly toward the village. He knew an
overpowering desire for the protection and companionship of man.
In his nostrils was the smell of the camp-smoke. In his ears the
camp-sounds and cries were ringing loud. He passed out of the
forest and into the moonlit open where were no shadows nor
darknesses. But no village greeted his eyes. He had forgotten.
The village had gone away.

His wild flight ceased abruptly. There was no place to which to
flee. He slunk forlornly through the deserted camp, smelling the
rubbish-heaps and the discarded rags and tags of the gods. He
would have been glad for the rattle of stones about him, flung by
an angry squaw, glad for the hand of Grey Beaver descending upon
him in wrath; while he would have welcomed with delight Lip-lip and
the whole snarling, cowardly pack.

He came to where Grey Beaver's tepee had stood. In the centre of
the space it had occupied, he sat down. He pointed his nose at the
moon. His throat was afflicted by rigid spasms, his mouth opened,
and in a heart-broken cry bubbled up his loneliness and fear, his
grief for Kiche, all his past sorrows and miseries as well as his
apprehension of sufferings and dangers to come. It was the long
wolf-howl, full-throated and mournful, the first howl he had ever
uttered.

The coming of daylight dispelled his fears but increased his
loneliness. The naked earth, which so shortly before had been so
populous; thrust his loneliness more forcibly upon him. It did not
take him long to make up his mind. He plunged into the forest and
followed the river bank down the stream. All day he ran. He did
not rest. He seemed made to run on for ever. His iron-like body
ignored fatigue. And even after fatigue came, his heritage of
endurance braced him to endless endeavour and enabled him to drive
his complaining body onward.

Where the river swung in against precipitous bluffs, he climbed the
high mountains behind. Rivers and streams that entered the main
river he forded or swam. Often he took to the rim-ice that was
beginning to form, and more than once he crashed through and
struggled for life in the icy current. Always he was on the
lookout for the trail of the gods where it might leave the river
and proceed inland.

White Fang was intelligent beyond the average of his kind; yet his
mental vision was not wide enough to embrace the other bank of the
Mackenzie. What if the trail of the gods led out on that side? It
never entered his head. Later on, when he had travelled more and
grown older and wiser and come to know more of trails and rivers,
it might be that he could grasp and apprehend such a possibility.
But that mental power was yet in the future. Just now he ran
blindly, his own bank of the Mackenzie alone entering into his
calculations.

All night he ran, blundering in the darkness into mishaps and
obstacles that delayed but did not daunt. By the middle of the
second day he had been running continuously for thirty hours, and
the iron of his flesh was giving out. It was the endurance of his
mind that kept him going. He had not eaten in forty hours, and he
was weak with hunger. The repeated drenchings in the icy water had
likewise had their effect on him. His handsome coat was draggled.
The broad pads of his feet were bruised and bleeding. He had begun
to limp, and this limp increased with the hours. To make it worse,
the light of the sky was obscured and snow began to fall - a raw,
moist, melting, clinging snow, slippery under foot, that hid from
him the landscape he traversed, and that covered over the
inequalities of the ground so that the way of his feet was more
difficult and painful.

Grey Beaver had intended camping that night on the far bank of the
Mackenzie, for it was in that direction that the hunting lay. But
on the near bank, shortly before dark, a moose coming down to
drink, had been espied by Kloo-kooch, who was Grey Beaver's squaw.
Now, had not the moose come down to drink, had not Mit-sah been
steering out of the course because of the snow, had not Kloo-kooch
sighted the moose, and had not Grey Beaver killed it with a lucky
shot from his rifle, all subsequent things would have happened
differently. Grey Beaver would not have camped on the near side of
the Mackenzie, and White Fang would have passed by and gone on,
either to die or to find his way to his wild brothers and become
one of them - a wolf to the end of his days.

Night had fallen. The snow was flying more thickly, and White
Fang, whimpering softly to himself as he stumbled and limped along,
came upon a fresh trail in the snow. So fresh was it that he knew
it immediately for what it was. Whining with eagerness, he
followed back from the river bank and in among the trees. The
camp-sounds came to his ears. He saw the blaze of the fire, Kloo-
kooch cooking, and Grey Beaver squatting on his hams and mumbling a
chunk of raw tallow. There was fresh meat in camp!

White Fang expected a beating. He crouched and bristled a little
at the thought of it. Then he went forward again. He feared and
disliked the beating he knew to be waiting for him. But he knew,
further, that the comfort of the fire would be his, the protection
of the gods, the companionship of the dogs - the last, a
companionship of enmity, but none the less a companionship and
satisfying to his gregarious needs.

He came cringing and crawling into the firelight. Grey Beaver saw
him, and stopped munching the tallow. White Fang crawled slowly,
cringing and grovelling in the abjectness of his abasement and
submission. He crawled straight toward Grey Beaver, every inch of
his progress becoming slower and more painful. At last he lay at
the master's feet, into whose possession he now surrendered
himself, voluntarily, body and soul. Of his own choice, he came in
to sit by man's fire and to be ruled by him. White Fang trembled,
waiting for the punishment to fall upon him. There was a movement
of the hand above him. He cringed involuntarily under the expected
blow. It did not fall. He stole a glance upward. Grey Beaver was
breaking the lump of tallow in half! Grey Beaver was offering him
one piece of the tallow! Very gently and somewhat suspiciously, he
first smelled the tallow and then proceeded to eat it. Grey Beaver
ordered meat to be brought to him, and guarded him from the other
dogs while he ate. After that, grateful and content, White Fang
lay at Grey Beaver's feet, gazing at the fire that warmed him,
blinking and dozing, secure in the knowledge that the morrow would
find him, not wandering forlorn through bleak forest-stretches, but
in the camp of the man-animals, with the gods to whom he had given
himself and upon whom he was now dependent.